You can listen for the next week to a wonderful "Crossing Continents" on Radio 4, about the Marian shrine of Medjugorje, by Alan Little. He was a correspondent there in the Bosnian war. I visited it then myself, with a coachload of Brummie pilgrims who had no clear idea that they were even in Bosnia, still less about twelve miles from one of the war's nastier sieges although at night the horizon to the west would pulse white with shell fire.

Thirty years ago, Medjugorje was a dirt-poor village in the Yugoslav federal republic of Bosnia, a region still scarred by the massacres of the second world war; there is a Franciscan monastery a little distance away where a particularly zealous Croat catholic was presented with a prize for cutting the throats of more than 1,400 "schismatics" as the orthodox Serbs were then known. It would be wrong to suppose that Christians here are only Islamophobic. But still, I never heard anyone talk about Muslims there – only about "Turks". There are none of them closer than Mostar now.

Despite all this, it was to me a place of acute nostalgia. The smells of paprike, tomatoes and of tobacco plants growing from the hard cracked fields, brought back my childhood in Belgrade, in those days 24 hours journey by land rover to the north. To my fellow pilgrims, it was a fount of supernatural peace.

Twenty nine years ago, in the week after 24 June 1981, six village children started to see the Virgin Mary. Three of them still go into a kind of trance, simultaneously, at 5.40 every evening, and after seven or eight minutes emerge with a message from her: "She speaks purest Croatian", explained one enthusiast on Crossing Continents, an important point since when I was growing up the language did not exist at all: rather, it was known as Serbo-Croat, and the two girls who looked after us children, one Serbian and one Croat, understood each other perfectly well, as we understood them. Nowadays, both Serbs and Croats are convinced they speak entirely different languages and children who have grown up in Serbia and Croatia seem genuinely unable to understand one another.

Medjugorje was a Franciscan parish, and the Franciscans are deeply implicated in Croatian nationalism, and correspondingly suspect to the authorities in Rome. The official church refuses to recognise that apparitions, and the most sceptical voice in the Crossing continents programme came from a former bishop of Sarajevo. But nothing whatever can dent the faith of the pilgrims.

In many ways, Medjugorje is similar to the other Marian shrines around the Mediterranean, such as Fatima, Lourdes, and the lesser-known Garabandal. None of the others has the same association with blood soaked nationalism. All of them can inspire real devotion and charity. I don't doubt the sincerity of the people who believe they find peace there, and that they can spread it. Given the enormous amount of money and prestige which has accrued to the village as a result of the vision, it is remarkable how unpretentious the six visionaries have remained.

But that is, in a way, the really frightening thing about the whole story. The pilgrims and believers seem to suffer from a kind of migraine there, which blocks out half the world in a bright interior light, so that they see the Virgin's presence in their hearts, and don't see her picture pasted on the soldiers' gun butts or hear the rantings of the politicians

Nor is there any salvation to be found in atheism, for students of Yugoslav history: many years later I went to interview Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, who remembered how Tito tidied the Yugoslav nationalities problem in 1945: of the half million ethnic Germans who had lived for centuries around the Serbian-Hungarian border, he killed half and had the rest expelled.